Twitter To Finally Get Yoruba Translation

The Twitter translation centre is set to add Yoruba language to its list of languages.

The process which started on the 1st of March 2012 with thousands of tweets in Yoruba by some Yoruba aficionados on twitter had the goal of getting support for Yoruba on twitter.

These efforts were not in vain as Twitter’s translation desk took notice of the barrage and then promised that support would come in a few months.

The support however came two years after. The period of waiting saw another tweet Yoruba day in 2013, making for a more than 60,000 tweets in support of Yoruba language on twitter- 38,000 tweets in 2013, and about 24,000 tweets in 2012.

One of the key drivers of the Campaign is Kola Tubosun (@baroka on Twitter), a linguist and Yoruba scholar.

Currently, Kola and other enthusiasts are working to translate the Twitter’s standard glossary of terms to Yoruba. When the translation process is over with, Yoruba will be the only other African language asides Afrikaans (currently in beta) to be supported by the network.

Yoruba is spoken not just in Nigeria, but across the world by more than 30 million people, and was one of the first African languages to be added to the Google Translate engine. There is even a Yoruba section of Wikipedia.